The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets
Not John D. Rockefeller — a Rothschild anecdote hardened into a proverbUnknown — an investors’ proverbAnonymous · ancestor anecdote in print from 1893 · credited to Rockefeller only from 1990
?Attribution status: The Rockefeller credit is documented no earlier than a 1990 quotation anthology, which supplies no source; the near-identical wording was in print as a Rothschild saying in 1964, and nothing resembling the saying appears anywhere in Rockefeller’s own 1909 memoir.?Reuse status: Rights unconfirmed
“The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets” not John D. Rockefeller. An investors’ proverb of unknown authorship. Quote Investigator traces it to an anecdote in The Globe (Toronto), 29 December 1893, about an unnamed Rothschild, and considers that anecdote apocryphal. Harry D. Schultz printed “Buy when the blood is running in the streets” as a Rothschild dictum in Bear Markets (Prentice-Hall, 1964), p. 164; the Rockefeller credit first appears in Robert Byrne, The Fourth — And by Far the Most Recent 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (Atheneum, 1990), quotation 301, with no source given. Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to John D. Rockefeller. Use the credit shown above instead.
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? We couldn’t verify where this wording comes from, so there’s no rights status to give. Safe to present as an unverified or anonymous line — just don’t assert a specific author or source.
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Provenance
Where the saying actually comes from
Earliest documented form
The Globe (Toronto), 29 December 1893 — anecdote, Rothschild unnamed
This wording, credited to Rothschild
Bear Markets: How to Survive and Make Money in Them (1964), ch. 16, p. 164
First credited to Rockefeller
The Fourth — And by Far the Most Recent 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (1990), quotation 301
In Rockefeller’s own writing
Absent — no passage resembling the saying occurs in Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909)
A French investor at a critical time was advised by one of the Rothschilds to buy rentes. “What!” he cried. “Buy Government securities while the streets of the capital are running with blood?” “My friend,” was the reply, “if the streets were not running with blood you couldn’t buy rentes at present prices.”
The Globe, Toronto, 29 Dec 1893
This is the ancestor of the proverb, not the proverb, and not Rockefeller. It is the earliest match Quote Investigator finds, transcribed from The Globe of Toronto for 29 December 1893: an anecdote with an unnamed Rothschild and no maxim in it. The compact one-line dictum was distilled out of stories like this over the following half-century.
No copyright status can honestly be asserted for this wording, because no author for it has ever been identified. The documented carriers point in both directions: the 1893 Globe anecdote it descends from is long out of copyright in the United States, while the two books that carry the modern wording — Harry D. Schultz’s Bear Markets (Prentice-Hall, 1964) and Robert Byrne’s anthology (Atheneum, 1990) — are themselves in copyright as compilations, and neither claims to have coined it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Six claimants, no evidence
This is a proverb wearing a succession of borrowed names. The wording has been stable for decades; the credit line has changed roughly once a decade, which is the clearest sign that nobody can point to an original.
✕
The credit on this pageJohn D. Rockefeller Unsupported, 1990
Investing proverbs need a rich ancestor, and the Rothschilds were the richest name available. What Quote Investigator actually finds in 1893 is not a maxim at all but a scene: a French investor recoils at buying government rentes while the streets of the capital run with blood, and an unnamed Rothschild points out that the blood is precisely why the bonds are cheap. It is a story with a punchline, not a slogan. The 1893 telling names neither the Rothschild nor the city; the Paris Commune of 1871 setting arrives only with the 1894 retellings, and that later-added specificity is part of why QI treats the story as apocryphal.
1942–1964 — the proverb years. The Springfield Daily Republican of 19 December 1942 already treats it as a standing “Rothschild investment dictum,” and in 1964 Harry D. Schultz’s Bear Markets: How to Survive and Make Money in Them prints it at page 164 in almost exactly its modern form: “Rothschild once advised, ‘Buy when the blood is running in the streets.’ He said it all.” ↗
1973–1994 — the credit roulette. A 1973 Boston Sunday Globe item names Lionel Rothschild; a 1980 syndicated column hands it to Bernard Baruch; the 1987 book Blood in the Streets uses it as an epigraph credited to Nathan M. Rothschild; Byrne’s 1990 anthology credits John D. Rockefeller; and on 28 October 1994 the Chicago Tribune quotes Mark Mobius with the extended form, “you must buy when blood is running on the streets — even when it’s your own” ↗.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1839–1937 · American oil industrialist & philanthropist; founder of Standard Oil
John Davison Rockefeller (8 July 1839 – 23 May 1937) founded the Standard Oil Company in 1870 and became the dominant figure of the American petroleum industry before turning to large-scale philanthropy. He was an operator and owner, not a market speculator — his fortune came from refining, pipelines and consolidation, and his own memoir, Random Reminiscences of Men and Events (1909), is a book about building businesses rather than trading panics. He did, though, make one famous buy-the-panic statement: during the October 1929 crash he announced that he and his son had been purchasing sound common stocks. That single real episode is the nearest thing in his life to the sentiment of this proverb — and a plausible reason a Rothschild saying drifted onto his name.
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Cite this
Best available documentation
Earliest documented ancestor: The Globe (Toronto), 29 December 1893, as transcribed in “Origin of Investor Proverb: Buy When There Is Blood in the Streets,” Quote Investigator, 17 November 2025. The wording “Buy when the blood is running in the streets” appears, credited to Rothschild, in Harry D. Schultz, Bear Markets: How to Survive and Make Money in Them (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), ch. 16, 164. This exact wording is credited to John D. Rockefeller in Robert Byrne, The Fourth — And by Far the Most Recent 637 Best Things Anybody Ever Said (New York: Atheneum, 1990), quotation 301 — the earliest appearance of the Rockefeller credit documented by Quote Investigator, and given there without a source.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The way to make money is to buy when blood is running in the streets’?” Last verified 30 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-way-to-make-money-is-to-buy-when-blood-is-running-in/